44 pages • 1 hour read
Adrienne YoungThe Unmaking of June Farrow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Adrienne Young
Adrienne Young’s home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina informs Jasper, the setting of The Unmaking of June Farrow and a fictionalized version of farming communities in Western North Carolina. Young began her career with young adult fiction. She is the author of the Sky and Sea duology, The Sky in the Deep (2018) and The Girl the Sea Gave Back (2019), which explores a fantastical Viking-inspired world in which young women are warriors. She also authored the Fable series, which takes place in the world of the Narrows, a fictional setting marked by the dangers of the sea. The series includes Fable (2020), Namesake (2021), The Last Legacy (2021), and Saint (2023).
Young’s first novel for adults, Spells for Forgetting (2022), takes place in a small island community. The protagonist’s life is changed when someone she loved, who was accused of murder, returns and reveals the past. Like Young’s previous young adult works, it features communities centered around water. It explores themes of truth, memory, and murder that recur in The Unmaking of June Farrow.
Small-town settings are significant in both Spells for Forgetting and The Unmaking of June Farrow. Characters are required to contend with others’ perceptions: August with the circumstances of Lily Morgan’s death and June with her father and the townspeople’s views of the curse that affects the Farrow women. Like The Unmaking of June Farrow, Spells for Forgetting includes elements of magical realism with uncanny events related to the folklore of the island community.
Genre Context: Two-Setting Magical Realism
Magical realism originated in the works of Latin American authors, such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who is known for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Other notable authors of magical realism include Japanese author Haruki Murakami, American author Toni Morrison, Mexican author Laura Esquivel, Russian-Soviet author Mikhail Bulgakov, and German-speaking author Franz Kafka. Magical realism is defined as a text in which elements of magic or uncanny rules pervade an otherwise recognizable world. Different from fantasy, magical realism tends to feature magic without extensive explanation and depicts a world that is realistic to the reader. Conversely, fantasy novels tend to take place in a different world of magic and include much more extensive elements of world building and explanations of the rules of its magical elements. Magical realism often includes less explanation, with the magic being considered “normal” to the characters in the novel.
The Unmaking of June Farrow subverts two conventions of the magical realism genre. First, the “magic” is limited to women in the Farrow family. Rather than other characters in the novel taking magical realism as a given, inhabitants of Jasper consider the Farrow women very abnormal, treat them with derision, and at times threaten an ominous, potential violence. Further, the novel takes place in not one realistic setting but two: Jasper in 1951 and in 2023. This enables Young to explore what changes and what stays the same across time, particularly the idea that small-town mentalities can be insular and unyielding.
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By Adrienne Young
